A couple of weeks back, on Thursday 24 April, I launched my latest poetry pamphlet, Wanderland, a Poetry Book Society Summer 2025 Listing and nominated for the prestigious Wainwright Prize. We celebrated with a wonderful evening of readings, including kinepoetics from Scott Thurston and poems about concrete (but not concrete poems) by Lydia Unsworth, who even agreed to revisit the Oulipian collaboration we made for European Poetry Festival a bit back.
So Wanderland is out with Red Ceilings Press (the same publisher as Lune), as they make lovely little A6 numbers, perfect for popping in your pocket and taking for a wander and a ponder, which is what Wanderland was inspired by and what it aims to inspire in its readers. Wanderland brings together three sequences about wandering and pondering. It lifts off with ‘Flight Patterns’, inspired by the RSPB’s Manchester origins and a pioneering ornithologist uncle, tours the watery world of Ilkley’s moorland spas and springs (from my Ilkley Literature Festival residency), and ends up visiting various urban-rural edgelands via a series of 100-word prose poems, which appeared last spring in the special Urban/Rural edition of Spelt Magazine.
Anyway, the Red Ceilings online store has already sold out of their copies of Wanderland, but I ordered extra, so numbered and signed limited editions are still available direct from me. Indeed, this weekend, I'll be reading from the book at this year’s Weaver Words Literature Festival in Frodsham, where I went to high school, so you can snag a copy then; I'll bring my best pens.
I'm going to perform the sequence of poems from the collection called ‘Flight Patterns’, featuring endangered British birds, written in tribute to Emily Williamson, who, 135 years ago, launched her Wear No Feathers campaign and subsequently set up the forerunner to the RSPB near to where I now live in South Manchester. I was commissioned to write ‘Flight Patterns’ for Didsbury Arts Festival and premiered the 12 poems (one for each month of the year, and for each of the 11 newly red-listed birds at that time, plus one for "all the birds") to a packed room at the Old Parsonage on a sweltering day in the summer of 2023. The performance, complete with birdsong and church bells and Ladybird books and poetry map and a bit of background on the process of making it, went down really well and received lots of lovely comments. I'm not yet quite sure how I'm going to squish it into half an hour, but I'm sure it'll work out fine.
So a bit more about the book. Wanderland is a meditation on getting lost in nature without venturing too far from the North of England’s urban sprawl. From the feathered friends of Manchester to the watery world of Ilkley’s moorland spas and springs, these poems urge you to take a moment to breathe. Welcome to the Wanderland journey – two poetry maps reconnect you with the hidden wonders sharing our towns and cities; a third sequence is for wherever you find yourself in the edgelands. Pop the book in your pocket and discover the paths yourself or escape from that bus commute with a virtual wander in the great outdoors.
I said on the Red Ceilings mailout: “I’m inspired by nature and the North, and fascinated by place and language. I’d like everyone to feel welcome on the Wanderland journey – follow in my footsteps and read the pieces in situ or join me for a virtual wander, getting lost in the great outdoors from the comfort of your own armchair.” Here are some rare ducks I spotted on the River Mersey down the road.
Will Mackie, in New Writing North’s New and Recent Poetry from the North: Spring 2025 round-up, said: “Sarah-Clare Conlon’s Wanderland is full of gorgeous observational poems about nature that are lovely to read and greatly skilled. Poems like ‘Colour by Numbers’ and ‘Thoughts on Silence’ have beautiful, memorable lines that conjure precise visual images.”
I garnered a cover blurb from Rachel Bower: "This is an intricate collection of wonder and maps and journeys. Some of the poems carry us through the year; others guide us through rivers and woods; streets and skies; birds and storms. The series of poems anchored by the specific site of Ilkley Moor brings the landscape vividly to life. Beautiful poems of treasure and nature and light."
And another from Jennifer Lee Tsai: "In Wanderland, Sarah-Clare Conlon takes us on an odyssey through nature and the edgelands of the North West. In these lyrical poems, we encounter ‘heartening aerial sights’, ‘sikes and sandbanks, marshes and margins’. There’s a sense of playfulness in these sequences of sudden reveries as Conlon invites us to ‘close your eyes and listen’, to see ‘starshine/in the gutter’. Her arresting use of language exhorts us to ‘imprint a pattern’ and ‘create our own ripple effect’. This is a gorgeous pamphlet – stylishly crafted, attentive and attuned to the surprises of the world around us, mindful of our place within it."
And as for the cover itself, the watercolour is by Susan Platt, who called it Poetic Nuthatch. The nuthatch is the second bird to feature in the book, "all disco eyeliner". Sue studied Fine Art at Manchester Polytechnic in the 1980s and has worked extensively within gallery education, lecturing in Graphic Design at Manchester Metropolitan University for over 20 years. I'd been following Sue's Instagram account intently during lockdown as she painted and posted bird upon bird, so I knew she was the person for the job. She's a mad keen birdwatcher and recently exhibited in “Fledge - A Year of Birds” at Contemporary Six gallery in Manchester. Be sure to go and see when she next has a show!
And check out my "Live" section for my own upcoming readings. (And apologies for the state of these fonts. Even with my ability to code, now ageing Blogger is full of glitchiness.)
